In an interview with the radio station Russia Today, Rostislav Ishchenko, President of the Center for Systematic Analysis and Forecasting, talks about who is trying to draw Russia into a military conflict, and why, Crimea's role in the situation, and the splitting of the Ukraine into separate territories.

In one of your articles, you wrote that the Ukraine was in all likelihood considering some sort of attack on Crimea. What exactly did you mean?

First, I don't think the Ukraine or even the powers that be in Kiev want to attack Crimea. I believe that even the orders to shoot that [Oleksander] Turchynov allegedly gave the military in February 2014 were a PR move. It's doubtful whether he gave such orders at that time. And, if he had given them, of the 20,000 soldiers who were in Crimea at that time, someone would have fulfilled them.

Second, as for an attack on Crimea by the Ukraine, I have already said and I'll repeat it: from my point of view, it's one of the last ways to start a war with Russia. It's perfectly clear that, from February to March of last year, they began trying to draw Russia into direct combat in the Ukraine. And it's clear that the idea came not from Kiev but from Washington.

After the failed attempts to get Russia to send troops to southeast Ukraine in March, April, May, and August, as well as in January of this year, the only more or less justified chance, from the point of view of international law, to instigate a Ukrainian-Russian war is to attempt to play the return-of-Crimea card. And it has been important from the very beginning to ensure that the Ukraine is not seen as the aggressor.

A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect "decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics." To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of "The Urals Mountain-Ash" (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with "CCCP."

One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting "Down with Soviet revisionists!" This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China's business, cultural, and political elites.

It appears the sea of de-dollarization has reached the shores of Europe. With Australia and UK having already moved in the direction of joining the China-led AIIB, The FT reports that France, Germany, and Italy have now all agreed to join the development bank as 'pivot to Asia' appears to be Plan B for Europe. As Greg Sheridan previously noted, "the saga of the China Bank is almost a textbook case of the failure of Obama's foreign policy," but as The FT concludes, the European decisions represent a significant setback for the Obama administration, which has argued that western countries could have more influence over the workings of the new bank if they stayed together on the outside. As Forbes notes, this leaves Obama with 3 uncomfortable options...

As The FT reports,

France, Germany and Italy have all agreed to follow Britain's lead and join a China-led international development bank, according to European officials, delivering a blow to US efforts to keep leading western countries out of the new institution.

The decision by the three European governments comes after Britain announced last week that it would join the $50bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a potential rival to the Washington-based World Bank.

...

The European decisions represent a significant setback for the Obama administration, which has argued that western countries could have more influence over the workings of the new bank if they stayed together on the outside and pushed for higher lending standards.

The AIIB, which was formally launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping last year, is one element of a broader Chinese push to create new financial and economic institutions that will increase its international influence. It has become a central issue in the growing contest between China and the US over who will define the economic and trade rules in Asia over the coming decades.

The American Government's biggest lie in 2002-2003 was about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. We've already seen what that lie produced. It cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion, produced ISIS, and caused death and destruction in Iraq that make Saddam Hussein's dictatorship look benign by comparison. Are Americans still fooling themselves about that? (Some are; but most are not.)

The American Government's biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine — and it's even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that's totally unnecessary for America's national-security, and that actually places all of our nation's security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats ("oligarchs") in both the U.S. and Ukraine — not for any real reasons of the American people, at all.

But, that's where we are heading, nonetheless, because America's aristocrats overwhelmingly want it (as will be shown here).

The Empire of Chaos dream of regime change in Russia has always hinged on controlling large swathes of Eurasia.

With "friends" like European Council President Donald Tusk and top NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, the EU certainly doesn't need enemies.

Gen. Breedhate has been spewing out his best Dr. Strangelove impersonation, warning that evil Russia is invading Ukraine on an everyday basis. The German political establishment is not amused.

Tusk, while meeting with US President Barack Obama, got Divide and Rule backwards; he insisted, "foreign adversaries" were trying to divide the US and the EU - when it's actually the US that is trying to divide the EU from Russia. And right on cue, he blamed Russia — side by side with the fake Caliphate of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.

The second report about the war crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine by The Foundation for the Study of Democracy (the director - M. S. Grigoryev), in which the data is given about large-scale and systematic violation of the European convention of human rights by the representatives of the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard, and other units of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs, and also of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). We give some quotes from the report that we obtained.

War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture and inhumane treatment. Second report

Yana, victim's wife on SBU officials:

They have beaten him to death simply. When they came — they took him away to torture him. When they brought his body back — the heels were blue, the feet were blue. He's got some traces of punctures on his hands... I don't know... what they did to him, punctured him or drove the needles under his nails — there were holes on his hands. Each bone has a hole in it. They tortured him like... when there was a real war no one has tortured people the way they tortured him.

The data that has been accumulated since the first report by the Foundation for Democracy Studies provides ground to conclude that torture and inhumane treatment inflicted by the Security Forces of Ukraine (SBU), by the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard and other formations within the Interior Ministry of Ukraine, as well as by illegal armed groups, such as Right Sector, have not only continued but are gaining in scale and are becoming systematic.

Louisville, Kentucky - Louisville Metro Police Officer Jonathan Hardin, 31, has been arrested for assaulting a child at the school where he was working as a resource officer.

Surveillance video released after it was played during a probable cause hearing on Thursday shows Hardin choking out a 13-year-old student back in January. This was only five days after the officer allegedly assaulted another 13-year-old student in an unrelated incident.

Hardin was also named in a civil suit with two other officers who have been accused of verbally and physically abusing children during a summer program.

Surveillance cameras at the middle school also caught the first incident that took place in the cafeteria on January 22. The footage reportedly shows the officer punch a student in the face so hard that he is knocked to the ground, after accusing him of cutting in line.

The boy was subsequently charged with menacing and resisting arrest following the officer's assault. However, WLKY reports that court records show that the officer made the arrest based on facts that he knew were false.

Instead of being fired, suspended, or moved to a position away from children, the officer remained on duty and January 27th he was caught on camera assaulting a child once again.

A Split at Last?

Many of us have been wondering how much longer Europe will harm and abase itself in Washington's service. Has the crack finally opened? You must read this: Der Spiegel, quoting the German Chancellery, is saying that NATO and Washington are lying. "German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't the first time." "The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as 'dangerous propaganda'." "No wonder, then, that people in Berlin have the impression that important power brokers in Washington are working against the Europeans". The EU foreign policy chief says the EU will not allow itself to be dragged into confrontation with Moscow. Rather late but welcome nevertheless. Perhaps this explains why Washington took its first step to de-escalate by postponing sending troops to Ukraine. In Washington's war against Russia, it's Europe that is paying and, should fighting spread out of Ukraine, it is where it will be fought.


More De-escalation?

Zbigniew Brzezinski ("without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire") now says Washington should assure Moscow that Ukraine will never be in NATO. Of course NATO and the EU are already pretty tightly joined (more tightly than people realise) but that's something.

A senior Iraqi legislator lashed out at the western countries and their regional allies for supporting Takfiri terrorists in Iraq, and said he is in possession of irrefutable intelligence documents showing that ISIL is receiving arms aids from Israel as well as a number western and Arab countries.

"We have intelligence which shows Israel and some major western and regional states have supplied weapons to ISIL," Al-Qad news website quoted member of the Iraqi parliament's Security and Defense Committee Abbas al-Khazali as saying on Monday.

Meantime, the Iraqi legislator stressed that his country needs more weapons to fight the ISIL, and said Baghdad is willing to purchase weapons from East European countries, Russia and China.

On Friday, we learned that the official "unemployment rate" has fallen to 5.5 percent. Since an unemployment rate of 5 percent is considered to be "full employment" by many economists, many in the mainstream media took this as a sign that the U.S. economy has almost fully "recovered" since the last recession. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some Federal Reserve officials believe that "the U.S. economy is already at full employment". But how can this possibly be? It certainly does not square with reality. Personally, I know people that have been struggling with unemployment for years and that still cannot find a decent job. And I get emails from readers all the time that are heartbroken because they are suffering through extended periods of unemployment. So what in the world is going on? How can the government be telling us that we are nearly at "full employment" when so many people can't find work? Could it be possible that the government numbers are misleading?

It is my contention that the official "unemployment rate" has become so politicized and so manipulated that it is essentially meaningless at this point. The following are 10 reasons why...

#1 Since February 2008, the size of the U.S. population has grown by 16.8 million people, but the number of full-time jobs has actually decreased by 140,000.

#2 The percentage of working age Americans that have a job right now is still about the same as it was during the depths of the last recession. Posted below is a chart that shows how the employment-population ratio has changed since the beginning of the decade. Does this look like a full-blown "employment recovery" to you?...